Steinhaus: A fresh take on German fare

Restaurant shows promise as something other than typical, but could stand to tighten up

12:37 PM,
Dec. 27, 2012

Steinhaus restaurant in Florence serves Steinhaus Schweinshaxe (pork shank) oven roasted with mashed potatoes and bacon sauerkraut, and Schweine Schnitzel (pork) along with a Stein club for those beer drinkers.

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Steinhaus offers itself as a new kind of German restaurant: more authentic, less stereotyped and more modern than many American German restaurants. It is owned by Detlef and Karen Koeppe and takes the place of German Cuisine, the German sausage shop they ran from 1995 to 2007. They have gutted and rebuilt the space into an unusual configuration, built around a spiral that ends in a large round table. The design was done according to feng shui.

So Steinhaus doesn't look like a typical German restaurant. It doesn't sound like one, either. No oom-pahpah at all. The night I dined there, a tasteful ...